Gearing up for Wikimania 2013
The ninth annual Wikimania conference will open in just over a week at the Jockey Club Auditorium, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Wikimania is for people worldwide who have an interest in Wikimedia Foundation projects. It features presentations and discussions on those projects, on free knowledge and content, and on related social and technical issues. Attendance at the first three conferences—in Frankfurt, Germany; Cambridge, US; and Taipei, Taiwan—ranged from 380 to 440. This rose to 500–650 for Alexandria, Egypt; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Gdansk, Poland; to 720 in Haifa, Israel in 2011; and then nearly doubled to around 1400 for Washington DC last year with relatively easy access for many Americans.
Wikimania 2013 will be held 7–11 August, and a related Facebook page and Twitter account are already active. Although the English Wikipedia article on Wikimania clearly announces the "Wikimedia Foundation" as the organiser, in fact a dedicated organising team is in charge of the event, arranged by the Hong Kong chapter, which owns copyright on the official logo.
The organisers told the Signpost they expect a thousand people to attend, including volunteers, journalists, and VIPs. There has been significant media interest, says the team's Deryck Chan: "Of interest to Signpost readers are two recent feature pieces in the South China Morning Post, the main English-language newspaper of Hong Kong: there was a front-page article on Wikimania two weeks ago, focusing on the gender gap, and a detailed piece just came out on Monday." The committee has also received significant media interest in covering Wikimania itself. The preparatory meetup in July, he says, "was attended by journalists from three news agencies ... Press pass registration has been open for a few weeks and we're having a good turnout of journalist registrations."
Several attendees at a previous conference complained to the Signpost that Internet connectivity was poor from venues and hotels. We asked Deryck Chan whether Wi-Fi access will be satisfactory: "Yes. We're grateful that [Polytechnic University] is aware of the heavy use of internet by Wikimania and is deploying additional network hardware to ensure good wi-fi coverage at the lecture halls and meeting rooms. For the HKBU dorms [the primary accommodations], wi-fi tickets are arranged for all Wikimania guests. Our hotel recommendations are also chosen partly based on their ability to provide internet connections to guests." Nevertheless, he warned visitors to expect slower connections to Wikimedia projects than are typical in some countries: "The physical distance between Hong Kong and Wikimedia's server clusters means that higher latency and slower speed are inevitable."